What do news orgs really do?

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I’ve been turning to existential questions in recent days. Why are we here? What are we doing? Who will miss us when we’re gone?

To be clear, I’m not asking these questions about the human race – though they feel more apposite at the moment – but news providers.

I think my introspection has come because I’ve been getting my head around the issues of numerous clients and prospects and the general mood music of an industry whose old certainties are disappearing fast. And it’s clear that there are many different, and wildly varying, answers to the questions.

I remain surprised at how many people still want to describe their purpose as being a “paper of record”. I understand the instinct because it speaks to our profession’s desire for accuracy, authority and completeness.
But what does “paper of record” mean in a world where almost no one consumes news from a single source? Even at their height, newspapers were never neutral chroniclers of the world. They were edited products, shaped by judgment and bounded by the size of the paper.

Now audiences build their own view of the world from dozens of sources, often surfaced by platforms or AI. In that context, the idea that any one organisation can be the definitive record feels hard to sustain.

Robert Thomson, the ceo of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, said the other day that his business was an “AI input company” whose purpose was to provide trusted and verified news for AI giants to distribute. That feels rather depressing and not something to jump out of bed for. But maybe we do need to look at business models to find our essence.

After all, newspapers were historically advertising businesses with an editorial product attached. The journalism created attention, habit and a reason to pay a cover price (which paid for the journalism), but the economic engine was something else. That model has been under pressure for years as reader revenue has taken on more weight. AI is simply accelerating the need to be much clearer about where the value really sits.

It’s become a cliché to describe the New York Times as “a games company with a news operation attached”. But is that such a bad thing if the games can help pay for the growth of its news operation, which by my back-of-an-envelope calculations pays for itself anyway?

This has also long been the case. When we looked at engagement on the early tablet editions at The Times, a disproportionate amount of its much-celebrated hour-long dwell time was coming from the crossword. We used to joke that we were “a crossword business with a newsroom attached”.

I think those examples should inspire us to think laterally. Recently, we were talking to a B2B publisher about their audience. On the surface, they produce journalism for a defined professional group. But when you dig into the real value, it’s about connecting one set of readers with another. In that sense, they’re closer to a dating agency than a traditional publisher.

So let’s break out of our traditional thinking. There’s been some thoughtful work mapping this out more broadly. Juan Señor from Innovation Media has outlined a range of potential models – from IT provider, educator, events organiser and brand licensor to ad agency and affiliate marketer. The point isn’t which one you pick: it’s that none start with “we do journalism”.

If you take away the legacy description, what is the job you actually do for your audience? Where do you sit in a landscape where discovery is fragmented and increasingly intermediated by AI? What is your real advantage – trust, expertise, access, utility? And how do you turn that into something that people will pay for, one way or another?

I don’t think there’s a neat answer. But it does feel like the organisations that make progress over the next few years will be the ones that are prepared to answer that question properly, rather than defaulting to what they’ve always been.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]